Stone Age Spaniards ate domestic dogs and badgers

Human bite marks on the fossilized bones of domestic dogs and wild cats, foxes and badgers show people in Spain thousands of years ago ate carnivorous animals if they became hungry enough. Archaeologists found the bones of 24 processed animals in el Mirador Cave in Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain.

Other evidence people ate the animals include cut marks, bone breakage and signs of what the abstract of the Quaternary International article at ScienceDirect calls culinary processing, including boiling.

The people may also have used the animals for their skins.

The lead researcher at the cave, Patricia Martin, says people ate the animals between the Neolithic of 7,200 years ago and the Bronze Age of 3,100 years ago. She said consumption of these carnivores in Europe was limited then.

Dog radius fragment with cut marks from el Mirador Cave (IPHES photo)

The practice of eating the small carnivores may have been associated with sporadic famine and shortage. “It’s one of the possibilities,” says Martin of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution. She added that in some Asian cultures and among the Berbers “considered dog meat as a rich source of protein and/or as a delicatessen meat. It cannot be excluded that in some cases the objective was to obtain the skin of these animals.”